A Tone Parallel to Duke Ellington. The Man in the Music
von Jack Chambers
Jackson, Mississippi 2025 (University Press of Mississippi)
274 Seiten, 30 US-Dollar
ISBN: 9781496855749
Another book about Duke Ellington? Well, Jack Chambers, known as the author of a two-volume work on Miles Davis, approaches the jazz legend from a different angle than usual. Rather than writing a biography, he identifies specific “themes”, as he calls them, which he then follows through Ellington's entire œuvre. And he actually succeeds in offering Ellington connoisseurs new perspectives as well as making Ellington novices curious about the music.
The very first keyword, “Harlem”, makes the approach clear. Chambers discusses the various pieces that Ellington dedicated to the New York neighborhood between 1927 and 1970, explaining in passing the significance of Harlem for African-American culture and Ellington's own roots there since his Cotton Club days. His discussions of titles such as “A Night in Harlem”, “Harlem River Quiver”, “Jungle Nights in Harlem”, “Drop Me Off in Harlem”, “The Boys from Harlem”, “Echoes of Harlem”, “Harlem Flat Blues”, “Harlem Air Shaft” and “A Tone Parallel to Harlem” are not analytical descriptions, but provide context and also convey the musical atmosphere of the pieces.
The second keyword is also one that winds its way through Ellington's recordings: the train metaphor. From 1923 to around 1948, the Duke made most of his journeys by train, explains Chambers, he enjoyed this kind of travel, where "‘Folks can’t rush you until you get of". And he wrote numerous songs in which the sound of the trains can be found and of which Chambers takes a closer look at “Choo Choo (Gotta Hurry Home)”, “Lightnin'”, “Daybreak Express”, Billy Strayhorn's “Take the A Train” and “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” – the latter became a hit for Jimmy Forrest under the title “Night Train”.
The first part concludes with statements by authors from the USA, England, Senegal and India about their first encounters with Ellington's music.
The second block deals with instrumental skills, and here Chambers first devotes himself to Ellington's importance as a pianist. He describes his mastery of stride piano, the stylistic change in the swing era when he had a congenial double bass player at his side in Jimmie Blanton, his features for the piano, the influence of impressionist composers, his love of experimentation in “Money Jungle”, his rare solo and trio appearances. What he does not describe, for example, is how Ellington tickles overtones out of the piano, lets them resonate and thus creates his own piano sound.
Another chapter is dedicated to the use of the textless voice in Ellington's œuvre, from “Creole Love Call” with Adelaide Hall to “Transblucency” with Kay Davis, “Blue Rose” with Rosemary Clooney and “T.G.T.T.” from the second Sacred Concert with Alice Babs. Chambers also describes the role of songs with words in Ellington's music, discussing singers such as Ivie Anderson, Joya Sherrill and Herb Jeffries, and finally singles out one of the Duke's song hits, “Solitude”, which he listens to in Ellington's interpretation, but also in recordings by Louis Armstrong or Billie Holiday. And he tells the story of Strayhorn's “Lush Life” as well as the background to an album that Ellington recorded with Mahalia Jackson in 1958.
The second part of the book concludes with statements by Percy Grainger, Hoagy Carmichael, Constant Lambert, André Previn, Miles Davis, Gunther Schuller and Wynton Marsalis.
Among the musicians in his orchestra, Chambers focuses on two in particular: Billy Strayhorn and Johnny Hodges, whose respective musical specialties he discusses on recordings such as “Day Dream”, “Passion Flower” and “The Star-Crossed Lovers” from “Such Sweet Thunder”.
Ellington appeared regularly in films from 1927 onwards, sometimes on-screen, sometimes as a film composer (often in both roles). Chambers' chapter “Accidental Suites” focuses primarily on later films, “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), “Paris Blues” (1961), “Assault on a Queen” (1966) and “Change of Mind” (1969), and concludes that some of these film scores are not so different from the suites that Ellington composed regularly from the 1930s onwards.
Over the years, the Duke traveled to all continents and drew inspiration for his own music from what he experienced and heard. Chambers discusses individual movements from the “Far East Suite”, with which Ellington reacted to his trip for the State Department through the Near and Middle East, and emphasizes that the Duke was never interested in a direct influence, i.e. in reproducing sounds he heard on his travels, but always in what Ellington himself jokingly called a “genuine original synthetic hybrid”. Chambers also sheds light on “Afro-Eurasian Eclipse”, a suite influenced by Marshall McLuhan's writings, and the “Togo Brava Suite”, which Ellington wrote in gratitude for a stamp with which the Republic of Togo had honored him. He also makes a detour here to Ellington's fascination with new sounds, telling how Norris Turney replaced Johnny Hodges in the saxophone section in 1969, a musician who could play all the woodwind instruments, so that the Duke sometimes put him in the trombone section with the tenor when a voice was missing there. Above all, however, Turney encouraged him to use the sound of the flute as an additional timbre.
This block is also followed by statements on Ellington, this time by poets such as Blaise Cendrars, Boris Vian, Philip Larkin, Judy Collins and Maya Angelou.
The last – and weightiest – block is devoted to Ellington, the composer of extended works. Chambers begins with a chapter on “Such Sweet Thunder”, Ellington's twelve-movement approach to the work of William Shakespeare, which Chambers first heard in 1957, but in which he only discovered later, when he was studying literature, how closely the mood of the music corresponds to the characters portrayed. Ellington had studied Shakespeare's plays and sonnets at length, writes Chambers, and Billy Strayhorn, the co-composer of the suite, was also able to talk to connoisseurs of the Bard at eye level at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, for which the work was written. Chambers discusses the critical reception after the release of the record, addresses reviews that accused Ellington of perhaps having gone a little over the top, only to go on to show in detail which scenes and sonnets the twelve movements refer to and how the music relates to them. Finally, he discusses the different order in which the band played the individual movements in Stratford, at another concert in New York's Town Hall and on the published record; after that, by the way, never again, at least not in the full context.
In 1970, Ellington accepted a commission to write a composition for a choreography by Alvin Ailey, “The River”, which was to musically recreate the course of a river from source to sea. Most of the sketches were written while Ellington was on tour; from time to time he sent them to the Canadian composer Ron Collier, whom he gave a relatively free hand in arranging them for symphony orchestra. The chapter on “The River” is perhaps the cheeriest in the book, detailing the hectic pace of touring life and the difficulty of balancing Ellington's unusual daily schedule with the organization of such a large-scale project. It began with the fact that Ailey had concrete ideas when he first spoke to the Duke about the ballet after a concert, but that the Duke had completely different ideas, which he played to Ailey on an electric piano in his hotel room. Weeks later, Ailey met him again in Toronto, where he found Ellington in a room "full of sixty-year-old ladies, probably Canadian, whom he called girls. They just adored him.” After a while, Ailey complained that the sketches, ideas, themes Ellington sent him were not enough, that he needed a complete score, to which the Duke replied: “Listen, if you’d stop worrying about this music and do more choreography, we’d be a whole lot better of.” In fact, not all movements were completed in time, so that only seven of the originally planned eleven (plus reprise) were performed. Symptomatically, the Duke missed the premiere, which was celebrated by audiences and critics alike, because he was playing a one-nighter in Chicago.
The suites, especially those of the late Ellington, are obviously Chambers' main focus in this book. In the last chapter, he complains that despite all his success, Ellington never received the artistic recognition he deserved during his lifetime. The reason: he may have been eloquent, but at the same time he was far too modest an advocate for his own cause. And then Chambers discusses the subject from various angles: the success of his popular songs, the misunderstanding of the suites, the role of the showman who gives the audience what it wants. He recounts an incident in Paris that sheds light on how Ellington may have perceived himself and his success with the public: after a concert in 1950, which included his “Liberian Suite”, a fan commented: "Mr. Ellington, we came here to hear Ellington. This is not Ellington!” After that, the Duke recalls, “we had to tear up all the programs and go back to before 1939, to “Black and Tan Fantasy” and that kind of thing.” You could say: there are diehards. A single voice from the audience, however, intensified Ellington's frustration, which had already been triggered by critics, John Hammond, for example, who accused the Duke after his “Creole Rhapsody” of moving too far away from the “simplicity and charm” of 1931, which actually characterized African-American music. Ellington loved his audience, but, according to Chambers, he did not trust them to understand his demanding longer compositions. The reference to the Pulitzer Prize he was not awarded in 1965 fits into this context.
One could intervene critically here and question whether it really makes sense to differentiate so sharply between songs, dance music and his large-scale compositions, when neither the suites would be conceivable without his experience with the song form, nor his dance pieces without an awareness of form, nor the great hits without the knowledge of the aesthetic and commercial constraints to which he was subject as an African-American musician in the USA in the 20th century. But what better thing can happen to an author than for the reader to disagree with everything and enter into a dialog in which the book's arguments are taken seriously.
And so Chambers' book is neither a classic biography nor does it contain a scholarly analysis, but it is a successful approach to the music, to the man, to the musician, to the composer, to the recordings, to the circumstances to which Ellington was subjected. Chambers' focus on specific themes allows for a shift in perspective. Certainly he could have chosen other themes and made other observations, but that is not the point. His approach allows him to show the multi-perspectivity in Ellington's music. And with his clear – and thoroughly subjective – focus in the final chapters on Ellington's large-scale œuvre, he virtually invites the reader to question their own perspective on Ellington's work. He achieves all this in an entertainingly written and therefore easily readable style, with references after each chapter to the recordings discussed.
Wolfram Knauer (April 2025)
Sax Expat. Don Byas
von Con Chapman
Jackson/Mississippi 2025
235 Seiten, 30 US-Dollar
ISBN: 9-781-4968560-74
Don Byas shares a fate with Lucky Thompson: stylistically, both moved between of swing and bebop; above all, they decided to live in Europe after the war and thus disappeared from the American jazz scene. Byas was not Coleman Hawkins, whom nearly every tenor player of his time used as a role model; nor was he counted among the most advanced beboppers. He left the USA in the 1940s to settle in Europe, where he felt at home but lacked the American rhythm sections. In jazz history books, he is usually only mentioned in passing, a fact that this biography, written by Con Chapman, who has already published books on Kansas City Jazz and Johnny Hodges, aims to change.
Carlos Wesley Byas was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1913 as the eldest of three boys. He received his first piano lessons from his mother, also learned the clarinet and viola, and was already performing in concerts at the age of seven or eight. His enthusiasm for jazz did not meet with his parents' approval, but he bought an alto saxophone at the age of 13 and was soon playing with classmates, such as Jay McShann, who was three years younger. In 1930, he left high school and played in Andy Kirk's band for a year. At college, he adopted the name “Don”; his band was called “Don Carlos and his Collegiate Ramblers”. At some point during these years he switched to tenor saxophone, possibly because he was so impressed by Coleman Hawkins' solo on “It's the Talk of the Town” with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. In 1934, Byas moved to Los Angeles with bandleader Bert Johnson, where he joined the Lionel Hampton Orchestra two years later – something we know about mainly from contemporary reviews in which Byas is explicitly mentioned. He performed with saxophonist Eddie Barefield and Buck Clayton in L.A.'s Central Avenue district.
Coleman Hawkins was his first influence, Byas later recounted; he had first met him at a jam session in Kansas City in 1933. Another influence was Art Tatum, with whom he had already played before Tatum went to New York in 1932 and became famous. Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges, Herschel Evans and Benny Carter were also influential. Around the mid-1930s, Byas himself moved to New York, where he made his first recordings in May 1938, organized by the Danish baron and jazz fan Timme Rosenkrantz. He became a member of Lucky Millinder's orchestra, then sat in with Andy Kirk's saxophone section, played with Eddie Hayes and replaced Lester Young with Count Basie, with whom he recorded an outstanding solo on “Harvard Blues”. At the same time, Byas regularly appeared at after-hours jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. For the time being, Basie was to be the last major big band in whose saxophone section Byas sat; after that he tended to work in smaller combos, could be heard a lot on 52nd Street, with Erroll Garner, Coleman Hawkins, Eddie Heywood, and went into the studio with Mary Lou Williams, with whom he had not only worked with Andy Kirk, but with whom he also had an apparently somewhat toxic relationship. Further recordings followed, with Benny Goodman, with Hot Lips Page, but also under his own name. Byas was part of the transition from swing to bebop, and in addition to those already mentioned, he also played with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
On June 9, 1945, Rosenkrantz had rented New York's Town Hall for a concert by more advanced swing musicians, Red Norvo, Teddy Wilson, Don Byas and Slam Stewart. The latter two played an unaccompanied duet on “Indiana” and “I Got Rhythm”, which was released shortly afterwards on Commodore, a prime example of spontaneous improvisation despite prior arrangements. Byas' recording of the standard “Laura” soon became a kind of signature song of his career, a piece that was associated with him in a similar way to “Body and Soul” with Hawkins. Byas was busy, playing for a Broadway show, at jam sessions all over the city, on 52nd Street, with musicians of the swing era as well as with the young beboppers. In 1946, Rosenkrantz returned to his native Denmark and organized a tour for a line-up led by saxophonist and arranger Don Redman who hired Byas for the band and had arrangements of the new sound in his luggage, such as Tadd Dameron's “For Europeans Only”. At the end of the tour, which took them through Scandinavia, Belgium and Switzerland, some of the musicians, Byas among them, stayed in Paris.
He played with other American expatriates such as Tyree Glenn, Peanuts Holland and Bill Coleman, had regular gigs in Brussels and the Netherlands and worked in Barcelona for quite a while. Back in Paris, he went on tour, played in Switzerland and Germany, or accompanied Duke Ellington's orchestra as a guest soloist in 1950. From the beginning of the 1950s, he could usually be found in Saint Tropez in the summer. In Amsterdam, he fell in love with 26-year-old Jopie Eksteen, who soon accompanied him on his travels and whom he married in February 1955 - the second marriage after his first wife, who had died in 1951. Byas became a European, an Amsterdammer to be precise; he soon spoke Dutch as well as English. On the one hand, four children obliged him to earn money; at the same time, however, he did not want to accept every job. He had principles concerning the fee, but also the quality of the music. In the 1960s, Byas worked with Kurt Edelhagen in Cologne, then with Kenny Clarke and Oscar Pettiford in Paris, then played in a club in Monte Carlo, then with Norwegian musicians in Oslo, then went on a tour for Norman Granz with Jazz at the Philharmonic, in which Coleman Hawkins was also involved. He performed with Buck Clayton and recorded with Bud Powell. He didn't think much of free jazz, but the sound of Albert Ayler, whom he had met at a jam session in Copenhagen, appealed to him. Jazz had ceased to be popular music, and he complained about the Beatles, saying that they had stolen everything from R&B. Byas kept taking on tour gigs with traveling Americans like Ben Webster, Tony Scott, Earl Hines.
Webster gets his own chapter in Chapman's book. He and Byas were friends and rivals at the same time; they were stubborn and not necessarily more tolerable when they had been drinking. Chapman knows about Webster's visits to Byas's Amsterdam apartment when his colleague was not there and his wife found it difficult to get the bulky American out. And he traces the musical encounters between the tenor giants, at the Berliner Jazztage in 1965, for example, or during a record production in 1968. In that year, Byas began to think about a temporary return to the United States. In 1970, the time had come: he played in well-known clubs in the USA for six months and then went on a tour of Japan with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. After his return to Amsterdam, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, which eventually led to his death in August 1972.
Con Chapman did extensive research for his book. He has read newspaper reports from all over the world and contacted archives, for example to view birth and marriage certificates. He has pored over discographies and has certainly listened to every recording Don Byas has ever been involved in. He knows and tells anecdotes and rumors about the saxophonist, and he tries to place his life and musical career in its time as well as in music history.
Unfortunately, he too often gets bogged down with this multitude of information. One source says this, another says that, the line-up looked like this or that, Byas came to New York in 1935 or 1936... yes, but Chapman is the specialist; what is his assessment of the situation? Then he tries to bundle topics, for example by summarizing all (well, almost all) encounters between Byas and Hawkins or those with other important saxophonists or his various visits to Spain or Portugal, but in doing so he gets out of the actual chronological sequence of his narrative and leaves at least this reader slightly confused: are we still in the 1930s or already in the 1940s? Something similar happens to him in the narrative of his private life, Byas' relationships with and his dealings with women, his apparently not unproblematic relationship with Mary Lou Williams, the effects of his alcohol consumption and the like. Chapman has a lot to say about all of this, mind you; he simply gets the narrative mixed up.
Here and elsewhere, there is a lack of careful editing to weight and summarize the various topics. Especially as Chapman succeeds in some places in allowing all this knowledge to flow into highly readable paragraphs: in chapter 9 (Don, Sam, Carlos), for example, in which he gets to the bottom of Byas' personality and his contradictions. In Byas' estate, Chapman writes, there are oil paintings and drawings, he loved poetry and literature, spoke Dutch, French, Spanish, a little Portuguese and Italian. He listened to jazz, but also to modern European classical music. He played checkers, cards and table tennis. He went fishing and ice skating. He played billiards and rode a motorcycle. He swam, lifted weights and was an amateur cook. He soaked his reeds in cognac, but refrained from drinking since he was married to a Dutch woman. When he did drink too much, he was unreliable both musically and as a person. He was a charming storyteller, especially good when it came to fishing stories. He smoked the occasional joint, but refused to have potheads in the audience because they didn't listen properly. He loved jam sessions, especially when other tenor players were present. At the time of the civil rights movement in the USA, he saw his music as political, but he rejected a direct link between music and protest. He always emphasized that his decision to live in Europe had nothing to do with the color of his skin. Many aspects of his later life suggest that the ethnic mix of his origins – black and Native American – and the social status of his family – father: jeweler, mother: piano teacher – had influenced his self-confidence. The chapter on the two expatriates Byas and Ben Webster also has a lot of potential, but Chapman loses himself in too many chronological and thematic jumps.
The second shortcoming of his book is the fact that Chapman relies almost exclusively on other authors for musical descriptions. This may be a clever self-assessment; Chapman is neither a musician nor a musicologist. It is one thing that he introduces Mary Lou Williams as Byas' former lover at almost every mention, but nowhere refers to her significance for the discussions about the further development of jazz between swing and bebop. Of course, her avant-gardism had an influence on Byas, but when he describes her playing in one of his few own evaluations primarily as “adding dissonant tones to conventional harmonic progressions”, one understands why he prefers to rely on the assessment of others – although he hardly discusses their classification any further.
All in all, despite the aforementioned shortcomings, Chapman's book offers plenty of welcome material on Don Byas, a musician who has often been overlooked by jazz historians precisely because he moved to Europe early on and was virtually absent from the American scene. The collection of sources in the book's appendix alone facilitates further research into this outstanding expatriate. And for those who feel somewhat overwhelmed by the sometimes slightly exhaustive list of names of recordings, tours and concerts, there are enough suggestions to listen to recordings with Don Byas, this great link between swing and bebop.
Wolfram Knauer (März 2025)
Stomp Off, Let’s Go. The Early Years of Louis Armstrong
von Ricky Riccardi
New York 2025
466 Seiten, 34,99 US-Dollar
ISBN: 978-0-19-761448-8
Ricky Riccardi is director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, New York. “Stomp Off, Let's Go” is his third book about Louis Armstrong, after “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years” and “Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong”. Armstrong has actually told enough about New Orleans himself, he writes in the foreword to his latest book. His main task as author was to put Armstrong's memories into context.
He sheds light on these contexts from the very first page. Throughout his life, Satchmo gave his date of birth as July 4, 1900, a date that was valid until the 1980s, when a researcher rummaged through the baptismal registers and found August 4, 1901, which has since been generally regarded as the correct date. Riccardi is not so sure: You can take Armstrong's word for it, at least as far as the month is concerned. Well, he did make himself a year older. But he always celebrated on July 4th, his sister even testifies to this for her childhood. Perhaps the priest had made a mistake with the month in the baptism register – there is an entry above Armstrong's, for example, which also states August, although later documents about the person listed testify to June. "In the end", Riccardi writes, "it’s all irrelevant; the bottom line is Louis Armstrong was born and that alone is something to celebrate."
While on the subject, Riccardi continues to tell us everything we should know about Armstrong's ancestors: about Daniel Walker, who was born in Africa in 1792 and sold as a slave from Richmond, Virginia, to New Orleans in 1818, about his son of the same name, his daughter Josephine and Satchmo's father William Armstrong. Less is known about his mother's ancestors, but enough to fill a page and a half. Armstrong himself described the area around his birthplace as a “battlefield”, Riccardi researches who lived there and instead discovers that they were people from the lower and middle classes, most of whom owned their homes and had jobs. Louis' parents separated shortly after his birth, so Armstrong spent the first few years of his life with his grandmother, while his mother earned her living as a prostitute and was arrested several times by the authorities for alcohol-related and violent offenses.
Riccardi uses the resources of the Louis Armstrong House Museum for his research, including unpublished manuscripts for Armstrong's autobiography “My Life in New Orleans”, various letters and other written memoirs that Armstrong wrote throughout his life. His grandmother taught him to cleanse his bowels once a week with a laxative, we learn, which he kept on doing until old age. He learned to defend himself on the street; at the same time, he enjoyed the colorful, ethnically mixed city life. There was a band playing in every saloon; at the age of 5 he was already listening to Buddy Bolden when he played in front of the Funky Butt Hall to attract customers. But he also heard many other styles of music, ragtime, waltzes, tangos, mazurkas, influences that would later be reflected in his music. For a while he lived with his uncle, then again with his mother and her changing lovers. He went to school, but because his mother could not provide for him and his sister on her own, he had to go out to work. His grandmother also made sure that he attended church regularly.
His youth was not without its problems. In October 1910, he was mentioned by name in the local press for the first time because together with some other boys the nine-year-old had helped with looting after a fire. The judge sent him to an educational institution for black youths, the Colored Waif's Home. He was released after eighteen days and was soon back on the streets and working. After a job as a paperboy, he was soon helping out at the Karnofsky family's junk and coal business. Riccardi weighs up the various dates floating around for the start of this work and explains why 1911 is the most likely for him. For the rest of his life, Armstrong would remember the Karnofskys, Yiddish food, Yiddish songs, working on the coal cart, and his first trips to Storyville. The city's red light district had been located there since 1897, which he would not have been allowed to visit on his own as a black boy, but he was allowed to do so on behalf of his white employer. Armstrong always remembered this time with gratitude, but in fact, Riccardi clarifies, it was nothing more than child labor that he did in order to survive for himself and support his family.
During his lifetime, Bunk Johnson liked to boast that he had been Armstrong's teacher on the cornet; after Johnson's death, Armstrong made it clear: “Bunk didn't teach me shit.” But in fact, Riccardi explains, young Louis had copied some things from Johnson, such as his tone or his melodic inventiveness. A second influence was the cornet player Joe Oliver. Riccardi describes how Oliver had developed from being a rather mediocre musician to one whose tone and melodic invention impressed not only Armstrong. However, Armstrong did not yet play an instrument at this time; if anything, the influence of the two could be heard in his singing, in church or in a vocal quartet that he had formed with friends and with which he performed on the street. Here Armstrong took on the second tenor part, but also entertained the audience with jokes and dancing. He also whistled back then, in exactly the same way that he was later to play the trumpet, recalls Richard M. Jones. Riccardi supplements all of this with information about the history of the formation of the barbershop quartet and emphasizes the importance of this experience for the future musician. Virtually without lessons, he learned improvisation, voice training, how to listen to each other, play lead and invent new melodies as a second voice. He earned money with music for the first time, and at the same time other musicians became aware of the young singer. Riccardi dissects rumors that Armstrong had already made his first attempts on the cornet at this time just as thoroughly as the various versions as to why Armstrong ended up in the Colored Waif's Home again at the beginning of 1912 because he had fired a pistol on New Year's Eve.
As a repeat offender, Armstrong was committed for six months this time. In the meantime, the home had established a music program initiated by Peter Davis. Armstrong put together a vocal quartet with other boys until Davis offered him the opportunity to play in the band, first tambourine, then drum, then alto horn, then bugle, and finally cornet. By May 1913, Armstrong was already the leader of this band and probably not unhappy, Riccardi argues, when the judge extended his placement. Here he found structure, attended school, received three meals a day and clean clothes. “The place seemed more like a health center, or a boarding school, than a boys jail.” However, it may not have been quite boarding school after all, Riccardi suggests, for example when he discusses the rumour that all the boys in the home were sterilized. In June 1914, Armstrong was released, this time into the care of his father, with whom he only stayed for a short time before returning to his mother and sister. He continued to work for the Karnofskys and as a paperboy. The two most popular cornet players, Bunk Johnson and Freddie Keppard, had left the city in 1914/15; Armstrong now mainly followed King Oliver, carrying his instrument at parades, and occasionally played as a guest with the Colored Waif's Home Band. Together with former inmates from the home, he also formed his own band, in which he played an instrument that the Karnofskis had bought for him. More and more, music became a serious source of income, even if the scene in which he was active was anything but harmless, as Riccardi describes. Many of the saloon owners were also pimps; there were regular shoot-outs. His buddies from the Waif's Home were not necessarily the best influence either. Despite all this, Armstrong was fascinated by the demimonde of his youth throughout his life and liked to talk about the petty criminals and prostitutes, especially Black Benny, a musician who played the bass drum in some of the brass bands, but also never avoided a brawl and to whom Riccardi dedicates a chapter of his own.
Oliver let him play with his band a few times and Armstrong gained his first experience of using his comedy routines, singing and cornet playing in this context. Riccardi briefly discusses the importance of numerous white musicians in the development of early jazz, especially the recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. In 1917, Armstrong played with a trio (piano, drums) in Mantraga's Saloon, where there were repeated scuffles with the police and he learned for the first time how important some kind of white sponsor was in such cases. He made an unsuccessful foray into pimping with the result that his girl gave him a stab wound. An influence alongside Oliver had been the cornet player Kid Rena, who was known for his high-note playing. When the police raided the Winter Garden in 1918 and arrested Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds and King Oliver, among others, Oliver had had enough. Other musicians had already left for Chicago the year before, and now he was also drawn north. Louis Armstrong replaced him in Kid Ory's band. When Storyville closed after the USA entered World War I, Satchmo still played the odd gig, but earned most of his money in non-musical jobs.
The war was over, the saloons opened, Armstrong played with Ory again and became more and more popular not only among his fellow musicians but also among the dancers. In Gretna, six miles outside the city, he met Daisy Parker, “the biggest whore in Gretna”, as he once called her. At first it was just sex, then they fell in love, he remembers, then they got married. For their new home, he bought a gramophone and records, the ODJB, Caruso, Henry Burr, Halli-Curci, Tetrazzini, McCormack – jazz and opera arias that were to influence his melodic development. From spring 1919 he played in Fate Marable's Riverboat Band. Riccardi tells the story behind the Mississippi pleasure boats and the musical entertainment on them. The owners of the Streckfus company, which owned the main boats, were based in St. Louis, and Marable himself was from Kentucky, but both knew that there was something special about the music from New Orleans and that if they wanted to offer jazz on the boats, they needed musicians from there. Riccardi follows the course of the musical excursions, quoting from various local newspapers and from Armstrong's (and Streckfus') memoirs. For the trumpeter, the gig was also a theory course during which band colleagues taught him how to sight-read the arrangements that the band received directly from the publishers. When he left the Marable Band in September 1921, he felt as if he had spent three summers at the conservatory.
In his home town, the scene for Armstrong's kind of music had thinned out considerably in the meantime because so many musicians had left the city. Satchmo himself turned down all offers to go north, but when his idol King Oliver sent him a telegram, he immediately packed his bags. Riccardi knows details about Satchmo's landlady during his time in Chicago, describes the first performance with Oliver's band, and the audience, which included numerous young white musicians. They, like young black musicians, were inspired by the Creole Jazz Band, but were particularly enthusiastic about the young cornet player, who had a completely different dynamic on the instrument than Oliver. Armstrong kept a low profile on stage, though: after all, this was Oliver's band and he didn't want to steal the show. Riccardi devotes a separate chapter to the romance with Lil Hardin, which he pieces together from various sources as an exciting love story. On April 5, 1923, King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band made their first recordings at Gennett Studios in Richmond, Indiana, a five-hour train ride from Chicago. Riccardi describes the technical limitations of the early recording equipment, which couldn't capture the double bass or the full drum set, so Bill Johnson played the bass notes on a banjo and Baby Dodds used wooden blocks instead of the drum set. The musicians were nervous – none of them had ever been in a recording studio before. Riccardi describes the unheard of recordings that were immediately successful, so that by October Oliver was already recording for three record companies, records that were to write jazz history. Oliver was overwhelmed by the success; when he negotiated a pay rise but did not pass it on to the musicians, the band disbanded. Armstrong stayed on until June 1924, when Lil, whom he had married in the meantime, made sure that he not only changed employers, but also the city.
In New York, Fletcher Henderson had recruited Armstrong as a third trumpeter. He was an immediate sensation with his band members, the New York musicians and the public. Around the same time, Armstrong began recording as a studio sideman, for blues singers and in instrumental recordings under the direction of Clarence Williams. Riccardi describes Armstrong's instrumental voice, his frustration that no one would let him sing, the competition between him and Sidney Bechet. He recorded several sides with Bessie Smith, a pairing that complemented each other almost perfectly artistically. Armstrong was involved in numerous successful recordings, but his name was nowhere to be found on the label and was often not even mentioned. Lil, who had returned to Chicago in the meantime, made sure that this would change. She got him a job at the Dreamland Café and finally arranged for him to record with his own band, the Hot Five, which featured two of his New Orleans buddies, Johnny Dodds and Kid Ory. "We just played music the same as we did in New Orleans,” Satchmo remembers the first recordings. “The Hot Five would become a brand,” explains Riccardi, ”and from the beginning, Louis ensured that listeners would get to know the entire cast by name.” However, the Hot Five was primarily a studio ensemble; in real life, Armstrong performed with Lil's band at Dreamland and with Erskine Tate's orchestra at the Vendome Theatre. In the latter, he accompanied silent films; but above all, he blew hot solos in the concert sections between the film screenings. People sometimes watched the movies five times just to hear his high F's in the last number.
In February 1926, Armstrong recorded “Heebie Jeebies”, the first piece in which he sang extensively, and with improvised scat singing at that. His whole vocal approach had a huge influence on pop music, explains Riccardi, not unlike his way of playing the trumpet. In “Cornet Shop Suey” he describes Armstrong's “clarinet style”, a virtuoso technique reminiscent of the famous solo in "High Society" (in a solo concept which, as the author proves, was not improvised at all, but completely pre-planned). For a while Armstrong toyed with the idea of playing with King Oliver again, but then decided on a younger band, led by Carroll Dickerson, with a more modern sound, with a rhythmic four-beat instead of two-beat foundation. In July 1928, he went into the studio with a younger edition of the Hot Five as well, which included Earl Hines and Zutty Singleton. Classics such as “Skip the Gutter”, Hines' “A Monday Date” and above all the “West End Blues” were created – the latter in particular was an instant hit and an influence on musicians of all instruments all over the world. Riccardi traces the triumph of the recording and its influence on Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Leonard Feather, Artie Shaw, George Wettling and fellow trumpeter Jabbo Smith, who liked to challenge Armstrong in those years. The success convinced his label that this music could also be heard outside the "race records" market, which was primarily aimed at an African-American audience. The result was recordings as diverse as “Weather Bird”, an unaccompanied duet by Armstrong and Hines, and Don Redman's modern arrangement of “No One Else But You”, or “Tight Like This” with the longest Armstrong solo to date, which seems to tell a story from beginning to end. As a result, his producer urged him to go to New York and change his repertoire in favor of popular songs. He turned pieces written by Broadway composers into hits, “I Can't Give You Anything But Love”, “When You're Smiling”, “After You've Gone”, “I'm Confessin'” and many others.
And then Riccardi ends his book with a kind of summary: Armstrong "spent the first 28 years of his life soaking up music like a sponge. Growing up in poverty, a generation removed from slavery, he grew up hearing the blues and ragtime and the nascent sounds of jazz and quickly internalized the vernacular sounds of his race. But he also hummed Yiddish lullabies with the Karnofsky family, harmonized on pop tunes with his vocal quartet, sang in church, and bought records by superstars such as Enrico Caruso and John McCormack. He transitioned from Kid Ory’s swinging small group to the dance band of Fate Marable, studying the records of Art Hickman and Paul Whiteman as he developed his style. He played hymns and second line specialties in the brass bands, but also read scores and learned the marches of John Philip Sousa. Minstrelsy was in the air, in&uencing Armstrong’s comedic sensibilities through the recordings of Bert Williams, yet he also absorbed a new style of Black comedy pioneered by Bill Robinson, adapting accordingly to inspire laughter in audiences both Black and white. He tangled with Sidney Bechet and perfected the art of the obligato behind the blues singers in New York, while simultaneously getting food for thought from dance band musicians B. A. Rolfe and Vic D’Ippolito while serving as a sideman in Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. When his 'Heebie Jeebies' put scat singing on the map, he was accompanying silent movies with a symphony orchestra, trying to not get distracted by Moby-Dick biting into John Barrymore’s leg. He played music for dancing and became a dancer himself, demonstrating the Charleston, the Mess Around, and other terpsichorean feats on the Chicago stage. His 'West End Blues' changed the sound of jazz at a time when he and his bandmates raced to the radio to hear Guy Lombardo broadcast each night. He idolized pioneers like Joe Oliver and Bunk Johnson, yet made time to encourage his young disciples on and on the bandstand to seek their own original voices. All of this music – and more – was rumbling inside of his soul every time he hit the stage, summarizing all that came before him and making possible all that would follow."
Riccardi uses his final chapter to trace the lives of the most important figures in Armstrong's life: his wives Lil and Alpha, King Oliver, Bunk Johnson, Captain Joseph Jones, Peter Davis, his sister Mama Lucy. At the end, he discusses why Armstrong was buried in New York and not New Orleans. “You know, I never did leave New Orleans,” Satchmo had said in 1950 about the city where he no longer lived after 1922. “Right now I keep the essence of New Orleans every time I play.”
Ricky Ricccardi's book is the last in a trilogy of Armstrong biographies. The first dealt with Armstrong's late years, the second with the swing era and his recordings with big bands. The third now deals with his beginnings – and of the three it is probably the most fascinating. As archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Riccardi not only has all the sources at his fingertips; he is also an excellent and critical researcher. He looks behind even minor details, questions previous knowledge, but also allows different stories to stand side by side, suggesting which of them is the most likely, quotes from contemporary sources and knows biographical details even about minor figures – insofar as they were important for Armstrong's development. Riccardi writes briskly, in a style that brings the atmosphere of the time to life. At the same time, he manages to explain the musical peculiarities of the trumpeter and singer's music without lapsing into technical terms. And he is a sympathetic author – to his subject, his readers, but also to earlier contemporary witnesses or authors, whom he, unlike is often the case in the profession of jazz writing, reads as from a different time and takes their position seriously instead of condemning them with the knowledge of today. “Stomp Off, Let's Go” is definitively a standard work within the not exactly small Armstrong literature, and is also recommended to anyone who is interested in the early history of jazz. It is his last book about Armstrong's story, says Riccardi in the foreword. After reading it, at least this reviewer thinks: We sincerely hope not!
Wolfram Knauer (März 2025)
Peter Brötzmann. Free Jazz, Revolution and the Politics of Improvisation
von Daniel Spicer
London 2025 (Repeater Books)
338 Seiten, 14,99 Britische Pfund
ISBN: 978-1915672407
Peter Brötzmann was always proud to be one of the very few German jazz musicians who was able to organize numerous international tours without state support. He lived in Wuppertal, traveled around the world and his concerts in the USA, for example, were always well attended. Even Bill Clinton once replied to the question of which musician he liked to listen to, whose name would probably surprise people the most: “Brötzmann, one of the greatest alive”. It is therefore surprising that there is no biography of Brötzmann in English, apart from Gérard Rouy's conversations with the saxophonist (Wolke Verlag, 2014). Now the British journalist Daniel Spicer has produced one, as an expansion of a “primer” published in 2012 for the magazine The Wire. In the foreword, Spicer explains that he deliberately refrained from including the history of German jazz because Brötzmann's sphere of influence was so much wider. Brötzmann's art is a political manifesto, even if the saxophonist later distanced himself from the left-wing slogans of his youth. His readers should not expect a personal biography, he says, tempering any expectations; he is primarily concerned with the musician's art. In fact, Spicer writes about more than just the music; in the course of reading the book, you also get to know Peter Brötzmann as a person.
Right at the beginning of the first chapter, Spicer points out the extreme reactions to Brötzmann's music: Some revered him, to others - talk show host Jimmy Fallon, for example - he and his music were just a bad joke. Fellow musicians were impressed by the sheer power he drew from his instrument, so much power that he allegedly had no octave key for a while because he could reach the higher notes solely through the overtones he tickled out of the horn. Spicer counters this power with the fact that Brötzmann never used it just for the sake of volume. He compares his sound to the human cry, to the blues, and refers to moments of lyricism and tenderness in his playing. Brötzmann says that what has always interested him about jazz is that this music could only be created together. Sun Ra, Duke Ellington ... they were his role models when he joined forces with others in the 1960s to create something new, something of his own.
In the second chapter, things do become biographical. Spicer tells of Brötzmann's childhood and youth, of his fascination with visual art (the making aspect of it), of Ellington, Armstrong and blues records and of a Sidney Bechet concert. His first band is a swing trio in which he plays the clarinet. He works in a print shop, produces drawings, paintings and collages, enrolls at the Werkkunstschule Wuppertal and has his first exhibitions in Remscheid, Nijmegen and Bremen. He becomes more and more interested in modern jazz and at the same time becomes friends with Peter Kowald, who played tuba in a student Dixieland band, and hangs out in the current Fluxus scene. He becomes assistant to the Korean artist Nam June Paik, whom he accompanies on a series of exhibitions and through whom he comes into contact with the music of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He marries, starts a family, takes on graphic design jobs to earn a living and plays more or less “on the side”. Spicer explains the state of modern jazz in West Germany at the time: Albert Mangelsdorff in Frankfurt, Gunther Hampel in Cologne, and Brötzmann / Kowald in Wuppertal. Brötzmann himself tells how Steve Lacy heard and encouraged them, but above all how he introduced him to Don Cherry. Cherry hears something in Brötzmann's tone and invites him to join him in Paris. German Jazz Festival 1966 (Trio with Kowald and Pierre Courbois), a tour with Carla Bley's band, an acquaintance with Sven-Åke Johansson, the founding of the New Jazz Artists' Guild and Sounds Magazine together with Rainer Blome, participation in Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra, and finally “For Adolphe Sax”, his first album and, as Spicer notes, the first example of European free improvisation, released on his own label BRÖ.
The 1960s, writes Spicer in the third chapter of his book, was the decade in which an entire generation of young Germans questioned their parents and their involvement in the atrocities of Nazi Germany. There were similar youth movements elsewhere in the world, but in Germany, where Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former member of the Nazi party, had just been elected chancellor, the rebellion had a different flavor. Spicer talks about the Shah's visit to West Berlin, the death of Benno Ohnesorg and the beginnings of an increasingly violent extra-parliamentary opposition. In the USA, too, the free jazz of the early 1960s was political music, at least music that felt political in its radicalism. In West Germany at the same time, however, the word “free” alone had completely different meanings. Brötzmann says that he certainly sympathized with the left-wing movement at the time, but rejected its over-ideologization. The fact that the left-wing groups at the universities devalued his kind of free jazz as “elitist” and preferred to listen to music like that of Joan Baez instead did the rest. He tells how in 1968, the year Brötzmann recorded “Machine Gun”, three other musicians he was involved with went in completely different directions: Jaki Liebezeit with the group Can, Mani Neumeier with Guru Guru, and Paul Lovens with an early, still acoustic incarnation of Kraftwerk. He was familiar with bands like Tangerine Dream, but his idea of how music can change the world was different. Brötzmann and Kowald now had international contacts with colleagues from the Netherlands, England and Belgium. In 1968, Brötzmann was invited to play with a larger formation at the German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt, marking the birth of “Machine Gun”. This was clearly political music, say both Evan Parker and Brötzmann, a kind of protest that was part of all the discourses taking place at the same time. The most astonishing thing about the album was probably its success, writes Spicer, which immediately turned Brötzmann into a kind of underground star. In any case, his influence extends far beyond the sphere of jazz into rock, punk rock and electronic music.
Politics also play a role in the fourth chapter, which begins with Brötzmann's anti-capitalist stance, which Spicer describes on the basis of Joachim Ernst Berendt's invitation to the Berlin Jazztage, an invitation that Brötzmann declines in order to establish a kind of counter-festival instead, the Total Music Meeting, together with Jost Gebers in 1968. A year later, also with Gebers, he founded Free Music Production, a label that would soon document the lively free improvisation scene in Europe. Brötzmann is active in all kinds of formations, but above all he focuses more and more on the trio with Han Bennink and Fred van Hove, which is expanded into a quartet on occasion by Albert Mangelsdorff. Spicer describes how Bennink's often clownish interludes differ from Brötzmann's serious habitus; he also mentions that Bennink's jokes always had a musical core. He describes the effect of this music behind the Iron Curtain, for example at the festival in Warsaw in 1974 or at performances in the GDR. After Van Hove left the trio because Bennink's stage jokes were too much for him (and the pianos in the clubs were too bad), Brötzmann discovered that there was even more freedom in the duo with Bennink alone. This line-up lasted until 1977, after which the two met up from time to time, but no longer played together regularly.
In chapter 5, Spicer sheds light on Brötzmann's collaboration with the bassist Harry Miller and the drummer Louis Moholo as well as his first contacts in the avant-garde scene in Japan. In Hungary he discovered the tarogato as an additional instrument; in the Netherlands he played with Misha Mengelberg's Instant Composers Pool. Through Don Cherry he met the guitarist Sonny Sharrock; he also took part in other projects of the Globe Unity Orchestra. In Hamburg, with the help of NDR, he is able to produce “Alarm”, another international and large ensemble piece.
After Miller's death, Brötzmann founded the quartet Last Exit in 1986 together with Sonny Sharrock, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Bill Laswell, and Spicer links this band in the sixth chapter of his book with the simultaneous rise of the Young Lions around Wynton Marsalis. Last Exit was also intended as a “Fuck You” and an antidote to the new conservatism in jazz, he writes. The band combines the spirit of free jazz with that of punk rock and reaches a primarily young audience. Herbie Hancock even plays on one track on their second album. It was not Hancock, however, but the punk, almost metal spirit of the music that made Last Exit so influential, beyond the jazz scene, but also into jazz, as Spicer notes, referring to John Zorn and his band Naked City.
At the beginning of chapter 7, Spicer asks whether Brötzmann is still playing jazz at all. Bill Laswell places the energetic power music more in the vicinity of punk rock; Brötzmann himself, however, always referred to jazz as a role model. Spicer recounts the (probably exotic-sounding to non-German readers) episode of the hour-long television panel in which several critics compared Brötzmann's aesthetics with Klaus Doldinger's in 1967 and most of them reacted to his attitude with incomprehension. Brötzmann himself commented that if he had learned anything from his American friends, it was stylistic openness. Spicer discusses the idea of an emancipation of European jazz from its (Afro)American role models. In the course of their work, Brötzmann and Kowald realized that African-American colleagues paid them respect precisely because they had developed their own personal style. In the 1980s and 1990s, Brötzmann recorded an album with Rashied Ali and Fred Hopkins, and another with William Parker and Milford Graves. Parker was also involved in Brötzmann's Albert Ayler tribute project Die Like a Dog Quartet. Brötzmann remembers that Ayler heard him several times at the Cave in Heidelberg, and Spicer asks: If Ayler copied something from you and the late John Coltrane listened attentively to Ayler, couldn't it be that you, Brötzmann, were somehow involved? Brötzmann reacts brusquely: “That's going a bit too far!
Spicer begins his eighth chapter with a description of the Chicago jazz scene, where Brötzmann plays a concert with seven local improvisers in January 1997, an ensemble that expands into a tentet in the fall of the same year. In this chapter, Spicer also talks about the reality of the musician's life, who had always consumed alcohol throughout his life. One evening in 1999, when he could hardly move his fingers and a doctor diagnosed gout and made a direct connection between the disease and his alcohol consumption, Brötzmann gave up drinking from one day to the next. With Michael Wertmüller and Marino Pliakas, he forms his next trio, whose first album title does justice to the music: “Full Blast”. Spicer goes through other bands of the early 2000s. And he tells how Brötzmann said goodbye to the Chicago Tentet in 2012 with a statement in which he lamented the routine that had set in with the band, which was perhaps necessary but detrimental to the art. It is also the money: there have always been financial hurdles, says Brötzmann; who could afford to pay such a large band?
In the last chapter, Spicer approaches the last bands in which Brötzmann was active, a trio with pianist Masahiko Satoh and drummer Takeo Moriyama, another with bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble. In Chicago, he met vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, and then steel guitarist Heather Leigh in 2015. In the last decade of his life, Brötzmann also made a name for himself again as a visual artist, with catalogs and solo shows in Chicago and Wuppertal. Spicer addresses the saxophonist's state of health, weak lungs and the hardships of the coronavirus crisis. With “I Surrender Dear”, Brötzmann presents an album on which he interprets standards from the Great American Songbook for the first time. When the coronavirus crisis subsided, the saxophonist was booked for concerts again, but the strength, the power, the ability to maintain an energy level over a long period of time was no longer there. After two concerts in Warsaw and London in February 2023, Brötzmann was hospitalized and had to admit to himself that he could no longer play. “I can't complain,” he says. “I'm 82 now, I've had an eventful life. If blowing doesn't work anymore then I have to concentrate on the fine arts again. Just stopping is out of the question.” On June 22, 2023, Peter Brötzmann died peacefully in his sleep at home in Wuppertal.
Daniel Spicer's biography is an exciting read at every point. He takes on the role of a partisan reporter, devoted to the person and the music of Brötzmann, and he does not make the mistake of wanting to include every, but really every album on which the saxophonist ever played. He spans the arc of an artistic career and provides sufficient insight into the sensitive musician, whose strong aesthetic attitude shines through in his music, but who is also driven by a constant desire for new challenges. In his research, Spicer largely limits himself to English-language literature, which, on the other hand, does not leave many gaps in view of Brötzmann's international personality. A selective discography concludes the book.
Wolfram Knauer (März 2025)
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